Contractors work April 11 to repair the trailways at Nyack Beach State Park, which was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy. / Ricky Flores/The Journal News

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SOMERS — Work to restore the great outdoors to what it was before Superstorm Sandy continues at parks across the northern suburbs.

But in popular places where whole stands of towering trees are gone, the spring season is taking on new meaning for nature lovers who are coping with the grief of ecological loss.

“You don’t really recover,” said Stephen Murray of South Salem, walking his dogs near the entrance of Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, where scores of cathedral pines were leveled five months ago by Sandy’s vicious winds. “The devastation of the woods really broke my heart.”

Park officials in the three-county region and stewards of private preserves say it will take time for bikers and hikers and picnickers to accept the new nature.

“We all want it to look like it has always looked, but this is the challenge of nature,” said Judy Terlizzi of Lake Carmel, president of the Putnam County Land Trust, noting the loss of large black cherry trees along the handicapped-accessible Lindera Loop Trail in Southeast. “It’s a new look that you have to get used to because nature does move on.”

In that spirit, workers are clearing dead trees and repairing infrastructure from Glen Island Park in New Rochelle to Nyack Beach State Park in Upper Nyack.

“The part of the trail that got damaged gives you an experience that you don’t get anywhere else,” said Christian Nielsen, manager of the 60-acre Nyack Beach State Park. “Most areas of the river around here are blocked by the railroad.”

The bulk of the work is in Westchester County, where wind and water caused $25 million in damage to county parks, including the historic Playland Amusement Park in Rye.

Workers can rebuild the damaged Playland boardwalk, and shovel out the sand that settled into the Playland buildings, and clean out the mud that washed into the Playland ride motors. They can rebuild the Yorktown portion of the North County Trail that remains closed because of uprooted trees.

But it will take generations before holes in forest canopies are closed.

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“It is definitely going to be different, but there is an historical reason for it,” said Peter Tartaglia, Westchester deputy parks commissioner, noting that costs will be recovered through insurance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “We are trying to get back to normal, but it is the new normal, because what’s gone isn’t coming back.”

At Nyack Beach State Park, where Hudson River flooding during the Oct. 29 superstorm destroyed part of the sea wall, a construction project is underway to rebuild the popular coastal trail that also was damaged, a job that is not expected to be done until Memorial Day.

“Once a week I’ll come on a Saturday or Sunday and spend an hour,” said Joshua Barnes, 55, of Nanuet, who described the striking scenery of the park as both a recreation and an escape.

“I reflect on my life a little bit, look for things, enjoy the birds, a little people watching, too,” he said.

Inland in northern Westchester, pyramid piles of mature trees were stacked at the entrance of Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River and in a parking lot at Lasdon Arboretum in Somers, awaiting pickup by an upstate logger. The timber will be milled for furniture, framing beams and pulp for newsprint.

George Mohrmann, 61, of New Castle even struck a deal with county forester Ted Kozlowski to trade four truckloads of white pine Mohrmann needs to build a woodworking shed on his property in exchange for giving county park demonstrations about milling wood this summer.

“It’s a way of using these natural disasters of history as educational tools,” Kozlowski said. “We are reusing everything we can, including chipping the logs to use as mulch on our wildflower meadows.”

At Rye Nature Center, where 100 trees were blown down by Sandy, stewards are making progress one tree at a time.

“A couple of the trails are still blocked by trees, but in those cases we are going to keep them closed because the trails were a little too close together anyway,” said Taro Ietaka, director of conservation at Rye Nature Center. “There is still tons of debris on the ground.”

In Rye and across the suburbs, the solace is that the space opened up by the fallen trees is now flooded with sunlight.

“It’s sad to lose a 200-year-old oak tree,” Ietaka said. “But there are a lot of little trees that have been waiting for this opportunity.”